(I have a finished chicken pen! It is beautiful! But it was raining all day Sunday, so I couldn’t take pictures, so it will have to wait a few days).

Sometimes things move fast around here. Usually they move really, really slowly (I mean, the decorating parts), but sometimes they move unexpectedly quickly.

I mentioned back when in my Superkea Sunday post that we were thinking about loft beds for Milo and Gus’s room. And I even posted a picture of Milo checking out the Stuva loft bed at Ikea:

Right after that post went up, I checked Craigslist on a whim and found a listing for not one, but two of the Stuva beds. That’s exactly how many Stuva beds we need! We’d had no plans to start on Milo and Gus’s room anytime soon, but now I have two disassembled Stuva loft beds filling up half of my garage, so…things have changed. We got the two beds for $400, and they’re in great shape, so a little decor schedule shuffling seemed worthwhile. But it has left me scrambling to come up with the rest of the plan for their new room.

For the past few years, their room has looked like this:

But that lego table doesn’t really get used anymore and the cushion on one of the hanging chairs deflated a long time ago and no one is feeling terribly attached to the awesome wall mural these days. And they both want desks, which is pretty much impossible with the current twin beds situation. It’s a fairly small room for two kids to share. Loft beds solve the desk/space problem, particularly ones that come with built in desks like the Stuvas do.

We’re hoping to be able to afford to finish the basement relatively soon, at which point a likely off to college Ari could have a bedroom down there when he comes home and Milo or Gus could move into Ari’s current room next door….but we’re not sure when that’s going to happen (it turns out college is going to be expensive. Who knew?!)…so we’re proceeding as if they’ll both be in here for the next few years.

Okay, so….my hastily thrown together plan! The beds are huge and, of course, won’t fit through the door when they’re put together. So we’re planning to go ahead and replace the carpet with bamboo before we move them in here, because we don’t want to have to take them apart and move them back out…ever. We want to do this for the whole upstairs (which is hardwood in the hallway, tile in the bathrooms, and carpet in the bedrooms right now), but we’re starting in this room and then doing the other bedrooms as we have the time/money.

The Stuva beds are super modern, so we’re going with that. Gus is my main helper with decorating choices, because he cares a lot more than Milo. Here’s what we have so far: